In conventional handling of incidents, such as alarms and/or events, for example generated by an element of a security system, such as a security camera, the indication of the incident is routed to an alarm operating center. An alarm operating center is a physical place where incident reports are handled by or on behalf of a human operator. Typically, an alarm operating center concurrently handles a considerable volume of incident reports. At the alarm operating center, each indication of an incident is queued and handled by the human operator, when a human operator is available. When no human operators are free and available to handle an indication of an incident, additional incoming incident reports are typically placed in a holding queue to await an available human operator, resulting in a waiting period that is, in comparison, longer than what is normal/desired.
Generally, once the incident is reviewed by the operator an action is taken, for example by dispatching a security officer to a scene where the incident was first reported and/or generated. To reduce clear times, it is necessary to maximize the efficient and effective use of the available officer resources and to have complete control over pending dispatches, dispatches in progress and officer status.
To cope with the complexity of different types of incidents, such as the above mentioned alarms and events, different computer systems have been proposed, facilitating the categorization of the incoming incident reports and the action to be taken, for example by the dispatched security officer. One example of such a system is disclosed in WO14121340, where a computing system is arranged to receive a plurality of surveillance feeds from a surveillance network, each of the surveillance feeds having a geospatial reference tag that identifies a corresponding surveillance location, a profiling engine that detects characteristics of the surveillance feeds that are indicative of categorized events and classifies the identified characteristics in event records, and a response module that determines a response reaction to events documented in event records using a response index allocated to corresponding event categories. Hence, WO14121340 provides some form of automation for taking the “correct” decision for handling the incident, and may in addition allow for response units in the geographical vicinity of the incident to take action as to the reported incident.
Accordingly, WO14121340 provides an interesting approach to improved handling of incidents, shortening both the time needed at the alarm operating center and the reaction time for the security officer, specifically as the security officer in the closest vicinity of the scene of the incident may be dispatched. However, in comparison to the presented computer system of WO14121340 and to other prior-art solutions, there would be desirable to provide further improvements as to handling of incidents, specifically allowing for improved scalability and use of distributed resources.